CHICAGO — Everyone experiences failures. But not everyone brushes themselves off and tries again. A new study shows that focusing on what can be learned from a failure appears to help people persevere — with a better chance of success the next time.
Jamil Bhanji is neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Brunswick, N.J. There are two main parts to any challenge that may cause someone to fail, he says. First, there are the aspects a person can control. Whether students study for a test, for instance, is under their control. But there also are aspects outside people’s control. Getting sick could make someone too tired to study, even if he might want to.
No matter what causes a letdown, there can be many ways to cope, Bhanji explains. One way is to concentrate on what led to the failure in the first place. If someone fails a test, a problem-focused approach might be to study more or better the next time.
But people who fail can also try focusing on emotions, says Bhanji. The test-taker might feel bad now, but he can convince himself that things will look brighter in the morning. Bhanji describes that as an emotion-focused approach.
Bhanji’s team wanted to find out what strategies people use to forge ahead after failing. To test this, they brought 30 volunteers into a lab and had them play a computer game. The game modeled a classroom and the aim was for players to graduate from the class. Those who succeeded would earn $10.
But getting a player’s character to move across the computer screen and pass the class was no easy task. Along the way, players faced setbacks that could return their characters back to where they had started.
For instance, one set of players encountered an “exam.” They had to guess at the right answer to a test, pressing the right key to move forward. If they guessed wrong, they moved back to start. Another group of players faced a non-voluntary “course cancellation.” Their players, too, got sent back to the beginning of the game — but there was nothing they could have done to prevent it.
After each “failure,” players were asked if they would like to try again.
The scientists looked at activity levels in parts of each volunteer’s brain as they played. The researchers used a brain-scanning technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. It measures where blood flow is highest and lowest. An area with lots of blood flow suggests that brain region is active. The researchers looked for which brain areas’ blood flow changed when the players decided to try again.
They found that activity was reduced in some parts of the brain when players were tackling challenges. For instance, the ventral striatum (VEN-truhl Stry-AY-tum) sits deep in the skull and is important in motivation — such as whether to try again. Activity here dropped off when players brushed off a failure that had been within their control (such as guessing the wrong key and failing that so-called exam). The lower the activity in this brain region, the more likely a player was to give the game another go. Reduced activity in this area may not be pleasant, since it’s associated with getting something wrong. But it also is associated with learning. As they change their behavior, participants might begin to feel they can do better next time.
But when players were faced with a course cancellation — something they couldn’t control — the activity dropped in a different part of their brains. That part is located right above the eyes and called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VEN-troh-MEED-ee-uhl Pree-FRON-tul KOR-tex). This area affects how we judge risk, control our emotions and make decisions. And for uncontrollable setbacks, the lower the activity here, the more likely players were to not give up.
After a setback we can’t control, you realize that this “isn’t due to your own actions [and] you can’t correct that behavior,” Bhanji explains. And this is where successful people put more emphasis on interpreting their emotions in a way that allows them to forge ahead. So when failures are beyond someone’s control, he says, rethinking our emotional responses seems to help.
